George Alexander Vela

On the Myths, and Why They Need Retelling

The Greek myths were never intended to be fair. They were intended to explain — the seasons, the stars, why the sea behaved the way it did, why certain families seemed constitutionally incapable of happiness. Fairness was not a design criterion.

George Alexander Vela's four-book series takes the myths at their word: these things happened. Bellerophon really did try to ride a horse to Olympus. Heracles really did perform twelve labours under a god's instruction and lose everything he built around the edges. Hecuba really did become a black dog howling on a Thracian headland. Penthesilea really did come to Troy with twelve warriors and a cause the world was in the process of forgetting.

The question is not whether these things happened. The question is what it felt like to be the person they were happening to — and what the poets, in their various enthusiasms for the divine machinery, tended to leave out when they told the story afterward.

The series began with The Fall from Heaven, a retelling of Bellerophon's story anchored to Corinth — a city the ancient world described as a barnacle on the isthmus, which tells you something about how geography and commerce shape the myths that emerge from a place. From there, the series moved through Heracles, the Trojan War's aftermath seen through Hecuba, and finally to Penthesilea and the Amazons: a people who existed at the absolute edge of the Greek world's imagination, which is precisely why they are interesting.

The narrator who carries all four books is present, opinionated, and aware that he is telling a myth — which the ancient sources also were, though they were less forthcoming about it. He has a particular interest in the gap between the story as it was told and the story as it probably happened, and he makes no attempt to conceal which one he finds more compelling.

The series draws on primary sources throughout: the Iliad, the Odyssey, Euripides' Hecuba and The Trojan Women, Apollodorus's Library, Pindar's odes, the Aethiopis of Arctinus of Miletus, and Quintus of Smyrna's Posthomerica. Where sources disagree — which is often — the narrator notes it and chooses the version that seems most true to the people involved, which is not always the version the poets preferred.

All four books are available in ebook and paperback. They can be read in any order, though the series shares a continuous narrator and rewards reading from the beginning — if only because the narrator becomes progressively less surprised by what the gods are capable of.

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